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https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/sleeper-agents-putin-global-hunt-a7978f84?st=BBMjiw>
"MI6 had a secret so sensitive that Slovenia’s spy chief needed to fly to
London to hear it in person.
Somewhere in his tiny Alpine nation, a pair of elite Russian spies were hiding
under deep cover. But the British intelligence agency couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell
him their names. The CIA had heard about them just days earlier.
Josko Kadivnik, director of Slovenia’s intelligence service Sova, meaning Owl,
felt his stomach sink. In its three decades of independence, Slovenia had never
arrested such a spy. Now, just weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine,
he was being tasked with a mission that went far beyond Slovenia’s borders to
the heart of a New Cold War: His small team of officers needed to capture two
Russian sleeper agents.
The stakes of this mission lay in Russia, where jail cells were filling up with
political prisoners and a growing list of Americans seized as hostages in a
geopolitical game of arresting and trading people like pawns. For every Russian
spy the U.S. and its allies could capture, one of the Kremlin’s prisoners could
be exchanged into freedom.
Working out of the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters, analysts in the
mission center known as “Russia House” had been mapping a network of
“illegals”: spies who spent years delicately weaving themselves into the fabric
of Western society. They included Russian intelligence officers posing as
Brazilian researchers in the Arctic and at Johns Hopkins University; and a
Spanish news reporter working on Ukraine’s front lines.
The Kremlin called these foot soldiers Vladimir Putin’s “invisible front,” an
army of agents living false lives on foreign passports and second languages.
Identifying one, American spy catchers would complain, was like finding a
needle hiding in a needle stack. Few would prove as well-concealed as
Kadivnik’s target.
The story of how the West hunted those sleeper agents has never been told.
Wall Street Journal reporters worked on three continents and spoke to more
than 30 former and current officials in the countries where they operated:
Slovenia, Argentina, Norway, Greece, Poland, Ukraine, the U.K., Canada and the
U.S. Hundreds of court documents and personal records revealed painstakingly
built false biographies, from a fraudulent Mexican passport to a doctored Greek
birth certificate. The spies left behind a trail of confused friends,
colleagues, and romantic partners, more than two dozen of whom spoke in detail
about the people they thought they knew."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
